Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has cruised to a new five-year term, taking more than two thirds of the vote in elections the opposition said were marred by fraud.
Museveni, 66, was comfortably re-elected at the helm of the east African country, soon to become an oil-producing nation, with 68.38 per cent of Friday's vote, according to full provisional results.
"The commission declares the candidate Yoweri Museveni elected president of the Republic of Uganda," commission chairman Badru Kiggundu said on Sunday.
His main rival, Kizza Besigye, who ran as the leader of the Inter-party Cooperation (IPC) opposition platform, lost to the veteran leader for the third time, after garnering only 26.01 per cent of the vote.
The turnout stood at 59.9 per cent, a weaker performance than the 69 per cent achieved during the 2006 presidential election.
Reacting moments earlier to near-complete results by the poll panel, Besigye listed a litany of irregularities - before, during and after the elections - and squarely refused to concede.
"We categorically reject the outcome of the election," he told reporters.
"We haven't called anybody to the streets but certainly we haven't ruled it out," said Besigye.
The police chief followed immediately in Kiggundu's footsteps at the tally centre's podium to warn against street protests.
"The constitution has mechanisms to redress any grievance," Kale Kayihura said.
"If they aim to do otherwise, I want to assure them that the full force and might of the law will come down on them and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves," he told would-be protesters.
After Museveni was declared the winner, much of central Kampala was eerily quiet, with long lines of security personel snaking through many streets.
Besigye claimed before the polls that only rigging could deprive him of victory and had warned that Uganda was ripe for an Egypt-style revolt after a quarter of a century under the same ruler.
The electoral commission acknowledged some minor irregularities but insisted they had been dealt with.
Poll observers reported some flaws in the electoral process.
In an interim statement, Commonwealth observer group chair Billie Miller said: "The main concern regarding the campaign and indeed the overall character of the election was the lack of a level playing field."
Since polling stations closed on Friday, parallel counting has been conducted in a secret tallying centre by a small army of number-crunchers from Besigye's IPC coalition with the aim of challenging official results.
But with only a fraction of the returns from polling stations trickling into the shadow centre, Besigye's parallel tallying appeared to have backfired as even his partial results gave
Museveni 62 per cent of the vote.
Polls opened late in some parts of the capital, Kampala, which voted against Museveni in the 2006 elections, prompting opposition claims that the president was trying to cheat his way to
re-election.
Some 14 million voters, out of a total population of just under 33 million, were called to choose their next president and members of parliament on Friday.
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